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Timothée Chalamet, who plays Paul Atreides in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films, at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival. Event photograph, not a film still. Photo: Somewhere In Toronto , CC BY-SA 2.0 . Display size adjusted; source photograph unchanged. Dune’s screen history is a useful lesson in adaptation: a story can offer striking images while remaining difficult to compress into a film. Arrakis, its desert landscapes and its struggle over spice are immediately cinematic. The novel’s political, ecological and religious connections are harder to convey without slowing the narrative. Denis Villeneuve, director of the 2021 and 2024 Dune adaptations. This is an event photograph, not a Dune still. Photo: Gage Skidmore , CC BY-SA 3.0 . Display size adjusted; source photograph unchanged. A curse is a tempting metaphor for the repeated setbacks. The more interesting problem is practical: each filmmaker had to decide which parts of Frank Herbert’s world a screen version could carry...